It can be appreciated that intrusion alarm systems have been in use for years and are commonplace in commercial and residential applications. Typically, intrusion alarm systems are comprised of one or more passive sensors connected to a burglar alarm panel located at the monitored building or area. When the system is “armed” and any of the sensors is activated, a notification is sent to a central monitoring facility usually via a dial-up connection. Typically, an operator at the central station calls back the location and attempts to validate the alarm, usually via verbal exchange of a “secret” code or password. Failure to validate the alarm usually results in a call being placed to 3rd parties such as law enforcement officials.
These types of systems consist of one or more sensors connected to a control panel, which monitors the sensors, and delivers a status message to an alarm monitoring station when activated. In normal applications these types of sensors can only provide binary information indicating the active state of an alarm condition. In most instances, the alarm sensors are connected to an intrusion control panel, which monitors the sensors and determines the state of an alarm condition. The alarm activations are then sent to a manned alarm monitoring station usually via a public switched telephone network (PSTN) dial-up connection.
The main problem with conventional intrusion alarm systems is that they are very prone to false alarms due to inadequacies with existing technologies, and they provide no inexpensive means to visually validate an alarm remotely. False alarm statistics are persistently in the high 90% range, an extremely costly false-positive problem. Attempts have been made to try to address the false-alarm issue by deploying traditional closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, however, these attempts have not met with success due to the cost of installation and equipment. Another problem with conventional intrusion alarm systems is that they are very expensive both for the initial equipment cost and monthly recurring charge to the end-user. Installation costs are typically passed on to the end-user. In addition, these systems typically use a dial-up connection to communicate alarm conditions back to a central monitoring station making validation a slow and tedious process. Another problem with conventional intrusion alarm systems is that they need to be actively monitored, generally requiring the use of a third-party monitoring service which can be prohibitively expensive and does substantially reduce the false positive problem.